Hello, EDITED Be prepared for some really rough documentation. If you're patient like a person reading a users manual, it should take you some time, but you'll be able to use this tool. If you're impatient like someone on the Internet who needs instant gratification, just forget this and go back to reading reddit.com. I finished this project and I wanted to go through a nice long debug phase, but I couldn't find enough people to play test with me :( As it stands, there might be a few bugs still in this, but I've used it to get a partial session done with people once. I'm moving on into development of crystalfighter.com, and throneandcrown.com. I just figured I'd spend part of a day and post this Game Master Client because I mean, maybe you can get some use out of it. In some ways it is superior to other Game Master Driven RPG tools. In some ways it is worse. The #1 way it is better is that you can play out entire levels, by editing up maps ahead of time. Players only see as far as they've scouted out. In general, you'll be moving players manually, but you can allow them walk their distance by selecting them and pressing ctrl+w. Also you can enable/disable freewalk if you want to let them explore for a few moments, but their speed isn't restricted. Okay, lets start. I recommend you get the art pack from the abcrpg.com, and extract to your my documents folder. I'm not sure where that is on Mac. Extract to my documents/abcrpg. Download and Install the Game Master mapmaker client. Get it running. Wait until the art shows up then you have two options: Open a map or Click to start a map. Since you have no saved maps, click 'click to start' Optionally you can change dimensions of the map from 10x10 to 9999x9999, but to start 100x100 is fine. Look at the toolbar at the bottom. It says: Tiles/Dominate Items/Cast:NPC/Cast:PC Information: There are 3 layers on the map: Tiles/Dominate Items/ and Players+Monsters A tile is rendered at the bottom. Dominate items, like a treasure chest gets rendered next Finally players+Monsters get rendered on top of that. That is all you really need to know about that for now. Click on the Tile tab, then click on first icon, which looks like badly drawn wheat. Now click anywhere in the grid. It will draw wheat on the map. If you switch painting modes to change all, go ahead do it, you click on the map and everything of the value you clicked on turns to wheat, aka the map turns to wheat. Now click grass, the icon one to the right of wheat. click change % and edit it to 5, then click on the map anywhere: All the wheat icons(the tile you clicked, has a 5% of changing to grass). This is good when you have flowers and stuff, you want to change the basic grass to other tiles. now click open square. Pick two points on the map. You'll notice it makes a square with an opening in the middle. Now click closed square, pick two points on the map, it makes a closed square. -------------------------------- Next click Dominate items tab. Click to place a point again. Click on a tree. Click a tree on the map. The same editing tools will let you lay down dominate items -------------------------------- Finally click NPC tab Click an extremely badly drawn cow And place on on the map. ------------------------------- Click the PC tab There's nothing here. You haven't hosted a game for players to join yet! ------------------------------- Click Tiles tab again Click the New Button at the very lower right of the tiles to select. This lets you upload your own 60x60 .png into the art library. This will let you make custom maps with good art! Lets look at the stats of a tile. Click say the wheat again. It says Visibility nearby 4%, and Visibility far 4%. This means when a player sees on the map, if looking across enough tiles, the visibility adds up to over 100, they can't see past that point. Walls should be 100%, but wheat is 4%. This means after 25 pieces of wheat, the player can't see past that point. Nearby % is if you're standing next to it. Say you stand next to a tree, you can see around the tree easier, but when it is farther away you can't look around it so it has more visibility. ------- Click Dominate items tab click the tree You'll see it has 10% nearby vis, and 25% far vis ------- Ignore cover. This isn't implemented in game, but could be easily. Basically it calculates the negative to hit penalty of shooting across cover. It'd be easy for me to fix this. If you want cover in, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/abcrpg and make a post about it. --------- Blocked 1= you can't walk on it 0=you can walk on it. For terrain they can walk on somewhat under conditions like cliffs and water, just manually move them as agame master, and mark it as 1 here. Walls are 1. Grass is 0. Roads are 0. --------- If you edit the cover/visibility or blocked, press save cover & vis, and it will save your modifications to disk. ---------- be sure to backup my documents/abcrpg from time to time when making lots of changes and maps. --------- [Re] means you can upload a different graphic instead for that icon if you uploaded the wrong graphic --------- So feel free to try and edit a map. Once you're satisfied, click save. Ignore the 1-50, you can name it any legitimate filename. Just remember it. ---------- Undo/redo does what they say. ---------- If you hold ctrl and click on the map, depending on which tab you have selected, you select the tile/ditem/npc layer. ---------- copy works by selecting two corners of the map ---------- paste pastes from the upper left corner over depending on where you click. ----------------- If you press delete key, then depending on which tile/ditem/npc tab you have selected, that layer gets deleted. ----------------- Once you have your maps edited and ready, it is time to bring in your PCs for a game session. 1) Open your map you want to play 2) Press f12 3) Fill in the details and tell your players the room name/password ----------------- They'll have to load the art assets as a lengthly process the first time they load. They'll go through this load each time you change the art asset library. ------------------ You cannot add new tile graphics in a game under way session. You can edit maps, and load/save maps. But you can't add new custom graphics during the session. Have them prepared before the session. ------------------- Players on their client can click the graphics icon to change the charcter icon they use in game. ------------------- Once the character is fully loaded, they'll show up in Cast:PC You can place them on the map, for them to see. ------ You type in the box in the lower right to say what is going on. /w whispers /roll 6 rolls a 1d6 /roll 3d8 rolls 1d8+1d8+1d8 Only the game master can issue a /roll /ignore ignores a player until you /unignore. This shouldn't be needed unless you host public games ------------------------------------- Click on a player f5- lets you edit their character sheet f6- lets you edit their inventory There is a special letter selection in character sheet the first [] is the speed. So if you allow your player to go 9 spaces on his turn do [9] somewhere in the character sheet for that. When you do ctrl+w on the player to let them walk, they're tethered by that length. --------------------------------------- f5 also lets the player see his character sheet f6 lets the player see his inventory. Only the game master can edit these at this time. --------------------------------------------- So the best way to host a game to start is to have a custom map. Add in custom graphics for monsters. Maybe even have a map for town. Then with your players, you don't let them free move. You ask them which direction they want to go. Then you place them on the map where they'd be at. If you use freewalk, players will scatter and the game will be nearly impossible to run. But if you ask them which direction they want to go, you can control what they see. Tell them what is happening and ask them what they'd want to do. If you want to remember a session, click the results of chat box and hit ctrl+a to select all and ctrl+c to copy, then put in a text file. Later, I planned on having full replay capabilities so these could be like youtubed adventures :) But like I said, I couldn't find play testers, so development didn't go far. if you have any luck getting the game to play, go to www.reddit.com/r/abcrpg and talk about it.